Simon Pulleyn

This looked like a book aimed at primary school students, but it is a topic of interest and I was at a library I had never been in before, so I checked it out. I was pleasantly surprised. In the first 52 pages it gives a solid introduction to what linguistics is about, and the terminology. Later on in the book that was a problem because I didn’t remember what some of the terms meant and they were not in the small glossary at the back of the book.

The chapter comprising the middle of the book has a few pages on a several of language groups. This was the least interesting part for me. I don’t have interest in getting that specific right now.

The chapter on writing systems was quite interesting, and included descriptions of famous decipherments.

Language Variety discusses dialects and language death.
One of my favorite quotations is traced in the following Wikipedia article.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy
Linguists lament language death in much the same way that biologists lament the death of a species.

Artificial languages are also give a brief but interesting chapter.… (lisätietoja)